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What is player agency to you?
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<blockquote data-quote="Pedantic" data-source="post: 9124880" data-attributes="member: 6690965"><p>The use of ritual here is interesting, and had me considering the place of rituals on other kinds of games and the purpose it (and by extension the purpose those games) serve.</p><p></p><p>I'm immediately put in mind of traditional cards games, which are nearly all also folk games, and idiosyncratic to where the rules were learned and deployed. Specifically, Hand & Foot comes to mind, a heavily ritualized but not particularly "gamey" game. Hand & Foot has lots of esoteric rules. For example, as my family plays it the game uses 6 decks of cards, divide into two roughly equal piles and starts with players attempting to pick up precisely 26 cards with one hand from either deck without counting. Those cards are then dealt into two piles of 13 (the "hand" and "foot") that will then be played, and if you manage a perfect 26, you slap the table 3 times with both hands and your team is awarded a bonus 100 points, a meaninglessly small margin in a game scored by the thousands. Without going into unnecessary details, the rest of play is basically a Patience/Rummy mashup, trying to sort cards with a restriction on you how access them, almost entirely devoid of meaningful decisions.</p><p></p><p>Fundamentally, the game is all ritual. It's a set of ritualized movements that make my family spend a couple hours around a table together, provides a topic of conversation but does not require conversation about itself, and slides easily into the background when the real goal is to spend time together. It is a fantastically low agency game, the outcome of which is almost entirely determined by chance, barely inching out something like War or Go Fish.</p><p></p><p>It's possible to discuss agency in that context because the game has a known, shared goal and you can measure player impact on achieving it with the available actions, but the meta-goal of the game, the ritual purpose if you will, has little to do with the goal of play, and is if anything, enhanced by having a needlessly complicated system that provides very little agency.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Pedantic, post: 9124880, member: 6690965"] The use of ritual here is interesting, and had me considering the place of rituals on other kinds of games and the purpose it (and by extension the purpose those games) serve. I'm immediately put in mind of traditional cards games, which are nearly all also folk games, and idiosyncratic to where the rules were learned and deployed. Specifically, Hand & Foot comes to mind, a heavily ritualized but not particularly "gamey" game. Hand & Foot has lots of esoteric rules. For example, as my family plays it the game uses 6 decks of cards, divide into two roughly equal piles and starts with players attempting to pick up precisely 26 cards with one hand from either deck without counting. Those cards are then dealt into two piles of 13 (the "hand" and "foot") that will then be played, and if you manage a perfect 26, you slap the table 3 times with both hands and your team is awarded a bonus 100 points, a meaninglessly small margin in a game scored by the thousands. Without going into unnecessary details, the rest of play is basically a Patience/Rummy mashup, trying to sort cards with a restriction on you how access them, almost entirely devoid of meaningful decisions. Fundamentally, the game is all ritual. It's a set of ritualized movements that make my family spend a couple hours around a table together, provides a topic of conversation but does not require conversation about itself, and slides easily into the background when the real goal is to spend time together. It is a fantastically low agency game, the outcome of which is almost entirely determined by chance, barely inching out something like War or Go Fish. It's possible to discuss agency in that context because the game has a known, shared goal and you can measure player impact on achieving it with the available actions, but the meta-goal of the game, the ritual purpose if you will, has little to do with the goal of play, and is if anything, enhanced by having a needlessly complicated system that provides very little agency. [/QUOTE]
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